Chasing April
by Cheddar the Cheese
Summary: After serving time in Azkaban, Draco sets off on a quest to find what he left behind but can he ever have that life back? Do the people involved want to be involoved? Or would they rather he was still in prison? r/r!
1. The Forgotten Color of an April Sky

The Forgotten Color of an April Sky By: Verna I don't own any of it. Thanks to Disalvokid who beta-ed this for me.  
  
*  
  
We are all guilty of something. You are. I am. We all are guilty of something. I sit here in my prison cell at the wizard fortress Azkaban and think of all the things I am guilty of: so many things-but the problem is that none of my crimes are the ones which are the cause of my current incarceration.  
  
Yes, I know. It is nothing out of the ordinary for a prisoner to say he or she is innocent of the crimes that sent them up the river, but I swear by all that I've ever held dear that I am innocent of this. I was never a Death Eater. Sure, I followed the Dark Lord. I killed for him and I was everything my father expected me to be. But I never became a Death Eater. Voldemort said there was too much innocence in me. Even after I had slaughtered hundreds of Muggles to prove to him my worth in his dark court he still deemed me too much of a child. But because my father is who he is, I find myself here.  
  
Harry Potter and his band of little misfit friends of his must have loved to see it in the Daily Prophet. "The Malfoy Family Goes to Azkaban!" I can see it now. Oh well. What's done is done and I'm sure that Potter still gets a good laugh out of the whole thing now that Voldemort is dead.  
  
Now there is a dim memory in the back of my mind. Laughter. It has been so long since a heard a peal of sane laughter. Sad, isn't it? That a person can almost forget the sound of laughter? For me, it is a dim recollection of a light and happy sound my mother and my nurse maids used to make. A sound from childhood days at Hogwarts or summers before that when he spent his time play games with my friends.  
  
But the dementors seem to love the taste of these very dim memories. They are the darkest yet sweetest desires of our hearts. Ones we often don't even realize we harbor still.  
  
It should hurt shouldn't it? All of this? I should be writhing in pain and cold from the mere fact that I am surrounded by dementors. Their cold should make me shiver but I do not. 'Why?' you may ask. I'll tell you why: I've felt it all before. But it wasn't from some kind of magical being in the past, oh no-before here, the tormentors were flesh and blood humans. It was so much more real.  
  
My father beat me with his hands or even a cane he kept in his study for just that purpose. The worst was when he put The Spell on my mother and forced her to beat me a hundred ways to Sunday. And all the while he'd sit there and watch as if it were some great sport for him.  
  
His eyes were so cold as he watched her do it; her eyes were complete contrast. Hers were so streaked with tears and pain at what she was doing. It hurt more to see that look in her eyes than anything that man in the corner could ever devise to do to my body.  
  
I was told once that my own eyes held the color and clarity of and April sky after the rain. I wish now that I had a mirror to see it. I haven't seen my face in three years and it has been that long since I saw an April sky with it's picturesque blue stretching forever above me.  
  
I was told by the one letter I have received in my stay here that my daughter bares these same April eyes. That's what they named her. April. The thought of her face, though I have not seen it in so long, seems all that keeps me sane in this hell. Well, as sane as possible.  
  
The walls here are so dark and cold. Every stone seems to meld into the next from years and centuries of people touching them in hopes of finding a weak spot-some way out. There are no windows and no sound comes from outside this cavernous room full of cells. I know it is April outside of the walls that hold me in. But yet, I do not know if it rains or if the sun shines from it's heavenly post. I know nothing outside of these four walls that hold me in.  
  
Ever read the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? I can't say I ever did, but I saw the title in a book shop once and it really struck home for me. It was a Muggle book though, and Father would not let me read it-so I marveled at the title rather than the content. It struck a strange chord for me then, and I have not been able to get it out of my head these past three years.  
  
I think I get it now. As much as I thought I must've understood it while living under my father's roof, I know now that I never did until I came to live here. Why would a bird sing if it were not free? I know why. Living here in this hell, I know why.  
  
That bird has gone mad and sings because it does not realize it is captive. The bird sings because he is as crazy as any other soul in these walls. But not all I of us sing. Some scream or are like me. As silent as we can. The singers so often cannot even hear themselves and so the rest of us pity them in silence. Like now, a voice drifts over the cell block. Perhaps she once had a nice vice but her throat is swollen from hunger.  
  
"I know why the river runs to a place so far away. I know why the sky is crying when there aren't any words to say..."  
  
It's some Muggle song coming from a young woman in a cell near by. She's only been here for a few months. I remember when she was bragged past my cell. We'd all heard her screaming as soon as the door opened and some one began to snap out a horrible rhythmic beat with their fingers. They did this when ever someone new came in. I remembered how frightened that girl looked as they dragged her by with the steady Snap, Snap, Snap that someone was making from the back of the cell block. So sad to think that she's only been here a few months and has already gone mad.  
  
"Do you know that song, Malfoy?" she calls. I don't know how she knows my name; I don't know hers. Not to say that I much care about either fact though. "Malfoy, you know the sky isn't really crying right? It's raining. Don't you love the rain, Malfoy? I do so love the rain..." Her voice gets dreamy as it floats off into the cold stones around us. The high thick walls simply absorb the sound.  
  
"What is rain?" calls another inmate from far away. His voice gives away nothing. I can't tell if he is sarcastic or crazy. Or maybe he is some combination of the two. But the girl keeps her singing going though no one listens but perhaps myself.  
  
As her voice floats around us, I think how sad it is that we have come to this. What is rain? What is laughter? Like a child we have no knowledge of these things. We must ask like a child but we have no parent to answer. Parents care and there is no one here who cares about us. I know that once, each of us took these simple things for granted, but now can not even remember what they are. What do April skies look like again?  
  
Over the din of my thoughts I hear another prisoner yell at the girl to shut up. "Do you know what rain is?" she calls back to him.  
  
"I don't care any more," comes the cold reply from the other side of the wall. For a moment, every one is silent. In a place like this the silence is more frightening than anything else here. The impact of his words have hit us all so hard I find it hard to breathe. He must have been here a long time, to lose that much hope. I still care about what rain may be, and what color the sky is outside. Times like this I treasure the memory of the enchanted ceiling in the great hall at Hogwarts-but the dark cold wall of this hell block is now the true sky.  
  
As quickly as that hellish silence was visited upon us, it is gone. It can mean only one thing. The dementors are back. As the cold memories that we each hold deep inside descend upon us in wave after excruciating wave, screams fill the thin air making it thick with pain and suffering. I see my father sitting in his favorite chair watching my mother hit me, over and over as he had commanded.  
  
Maybe it is my time. I was never exactly sentenced to the Kiss, but something tells me that it's coming. I have been waiting three years for it. For the day when I will know nothing and every once of pain will be evaporated from my body. The fact that any happiness will go with it does not bother me because I never knew any except in those few wonderful months with that whore in Italy who later gave birth to my child. Yes, I think, the Kiss would be better than all of this. Maybe it is my turn today.  
  
The tall hooded beings glide up to my cell and paused to look at me from beneath the dirty cloth. Fear enters my body as if it has been injected right into the center of my heart. The blood races in my veins but there is no prize waiting for it at its destination. Thrumming. Drumming. Roaring in my ears. The fear is so intense I can almost hear the dementors laughing at it. My fear gives them so much joy. And then they are gone. It isn't my day after all.  
  
In Muggle movies that I used to watch in those months before I came here where I hid out as a Muggle they always sugar coat prison. If Muggle prison is really like that, then I wouldn't mind living out my life in there; but in here it is so much different. Their's is a system of laws and order. But here, here you could be executed or given the Kiss at any time of the day or night. No one comes out smiling or even sane.  
  
The man in the next cell begins his screaming. I was glad that this time I did not scream. "No! No! Oh, God in heaven, no!" The warden stalks down the rows until he passes mine and stops outside of the cell next to mine.  
  
His voice is cold as the stone. "There is no heaven for the likes of you, Blaise. Not for any of you." His voice raises at the end so we all catch his words and their meaning.  
  
I shudder as though the room has suddenly become unbearably hot. Blaise. I know that name. I remember him from Hogwarts. He slept in the bed on the other side of Goyle. His screams for mercy echo in my head which suddenly felt empty of all conscious thought.  
  
"Oh, God please, no! Please, please no! I'll do anything! I'll...I'll give you names! Anything! Please! No!"  
  
In the silence that follows, some one begins to bang their chain against the bars of their cell. The bell tolls and it is for Blaise for whom it does so. It is tradition that the Kiss is never done in the cells; and as my old schoolmate is dragged past my cell, I too pick of my chain that links me to the floor and join in the unceasing rhythm. He doesn't see me but I see him.  
  
He looks terrible. His face is dirty and bloody from sleeping on the floor. His hair is matted and he has a beard that is green from something growing in it. And as he passes by I wonder if I look the same. Selfish thoughts, I know, but in this place there are no other kind. Dead man walking.  
  
All he can hear is the bell tolling his name over and over as we all join the steady pulsation. It is metal on metal and his screams are suddenly cut short by the slamming of the door. The clanging stops abruptly leaving my ears ringing in the sudden silence.  
  
The woman who was singing earlier strikes up again but her song is different this time. The sky does not cry and her voice echoes high and sweet in this place. It seems so out of sorts here among the pain and cold but it brings comfort to us all as we think on our own impending mortality.  
  
"Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, coming for to carry me home? A band of angels is coming after me, coming for to carry me home..."  
  
It is a pretty song, but I have never heard it before. And though Blaise was never much of sentimentalist, I know he would have appreciated the gesture of a mad woman. I would have.  
  
"If you come to heaven before I do, coming for to carry me home, tell all my friends I'll be coming there too, coming for to carry me home..."  
  
I don't know when my time will come. It could be as soon as tomorrow or the next day. It could be a week or a month or ten years from now. But one thing is certain: after that day, I'll never see the insides of these walls again. I'll wander lost forever as a soulless thing, but I will be free.  
  
"Well, I'm sometimes up and I'm sometimes down, coming for to carry me home. But I'd steal my soul if it ever were down, coming for to carry me home."  
  
As he song ends I think about what my life will be like once I am gone from here.  
  
Some day I'll be walking along under a gentle April shower and a little girl will approach me with a smile on her sun kissed face. Perhaps she will be my long gone child but I will not know her face. Perhaps April will ask me, "Don't you love the rain?" to which I reply:  
  
"What is rain?" She'll think it a joke and begin to laugh. Peals of gentle sane laughter. "What is that sound?" I will ask and she will stop laughing. I will be, to her, a man with eyes the color of the sky in April after the rain but does not know what laughter is or what rain is. Then she will weep for the sadness; for it is such sadness that a grown man doesn't know such simply joys.  
  
But I will have already been walking away, for I will have already forgotten her and our conversation. I will be singing under my breath as I walk with no purpose to my life. It is a song I will know but not be able to recall where I heard it first: "I know why the sky is crying when there aren't any words to say..."  
  
Then those skies will stop their tears, and the clouds will roll back. The church bells will chime to signal a wedding or a birth, and every one will run about with laughter on their lips in the bright sunlight of an April day under skies the color of my own blue eyes. But I will walk on, unaware of any of it. There will be no more April skies for Draco Malfoy, for I have forgotten what is the color blue.  
  
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	2. Tears for Slytherin's Drangon

Tears For Slytherin's Dragon By: Cheddar  
  
I don't own any of it and thanks to Disalvokid for beta-ing this for me.  
  
*  
  
Freedom. I was spared and now I have it. Freedom from the dementors and the pain. Freedom from memories so deeply buried that I had not known they were there. Freedom from crazy women singing Muggle songs; freedom from the monotonous and unceasing passing of days without a trace. Freedom from all of that; and yet I have become another kind of slave.  
  
I do not know how it happened. I was just turned out. No explanations or apologies. Nothing. Not a word. But I never questioned my fortunes. I had escaped the dementor's kiss which I had begun to think was inevitable. Cast out like they hadn't stolen the past six years of my life-like it was all just nothing to them. Like it was nothing to any of the damned so- called heroes. Self-proclaimed keepers of their twisted idea of peace. But then again, to them, I suppose, it was nothing.  
  
So I ran into the night without a back thinking question or a second thought. I never looked back for what was there to see. I didn't ever want to look back and see the past six years of my wasted life. The past I'd left behind? No. That lay ahead of me. I wanted to pick my life up right where I'd left off. But could I? I had been with HER at the time of my arrest. Would she still have my daughter? Part of me prayed that she would and the other part of my soul dreaded it being true. She was a whore in every sense of the word and I didn't want my child growing up like that.  
  
Felicity was the only one who ever listened to me. Not that she really cared. I didn't care either. She was nothing more than a two dollar whore to me but she still listened. I paid her and she did just about anything I wanted. She even cultivated my seed inside her to give me the single shining light in my life in the form of a tiny daughter. But she still meant less than nothing to me... And yet I went to her funeral. Perhaps because I saw my year with her as the only time in my life up till now that I didn't regret or hate myself for living.  
  
I told myself I wouldn't think about her, but then again I also said I wouldn't go. Funny how we lie to ourselves like that. I don't even know how I knew she was dead or where and when her funeral was. My Muggle inclined acquaintances would tell me it was love and those who are magically inclined in my life would say it was a second sight. (Note that none of the implied above are referred to as friends.) But Magic or love or loyalty or whatever, I went.  
  
The world seemed to slow and was concentrated on that cold clear spot in Whitechapel cemetery. It was as if the world had stopped for this single spot on the face of the earth. This blemish of men who had fed so many lies to their spouses over the frail form shut up inside the coffin.  
  
She inspired many lies and just as many poems regaling her charms. What she lacked in looks she made up in other ways that are not suitable to be printed from impressionable eyes. But be it... whatever it was, she drew us all her to her graveside, that sunlit, cold February morning. We regarded each other with veiled hints that if we had known each other when she was alive we would have hurt one another. But for now we tolerated each other's presence as a tribute to another whore lost to some sexually transmitted illness that one or more of those of us standing about now carried inside themselves. Myself excluded from those who did. The first on a very short list of blessings.  
  
Some one got up to speak. I don't know who he was, but there he stood with his back strait as a book binding and his face long with age, illness, and grief. "I was told once that when we die, we are not truly gone, so long as we have people left behind to cry for us in our passing. If we are blessed with such a tribute from our loved ones, then our sprits will never truly die out. Looking around me today, I see that the sprit of Felicity Aleene Bohalian will go on for all time. Every tear we shed for her will add another year to that time and so we bury her not with earth and flowers which can be done by any uncaring soul, but with tears.  
  
"She was a loving person who spread her wealth and hospitality with any lonely soul she came across. We were all there. On the brink of suicide or some other form of depression and she was the one who brought us each back to ourselves as we were meant to be but might never have been before. She told me once that she had been there once before and some one had taken her in, given her what she wanted and then set her out in the world. 'Not,' she told me, 'to face the rest of humanity alone but to fly and help others.' And so as we commend her to the earth and bid her farewell for the last time, may we go forth and spread her message of hope and cheer to those we touch. And may we each, as we step finally from her gentle hands at the end of the road, may we be able to fly." There was not a dry eye in the area.  
  
I had not known that about her and I saw the men around me with different eyes. We all did. We saw each other with more respect and on some level, more hatred for being some akin to our own sheltered selves. But none of us spoke to each other and as her casket was lowered and men began to drift away slowly, I stood there with the image of her pressed in my mind. On that last day of the month I said goodbye to February, the deliverer of April.  
  
I found out later that as benevolent as she was, she had given my child up for adoption. She had decided that she could not provide for the child as well as keep up her activities of love, healing, and sex. All she knew that all I was able to wrangle out of my informant was that the child had been adopted by a loving family somewhere to the west. But to the west of me was the whole bloody world and I had no way of knowing when the west once more became the east.  
  
And so I left my comfortable little room that I had rented with the money one of my anonymous captors/liberators had slipped into my pockets and set out. I assumed that but 'out west' she meant some place in the states; so I boarded the cheapest flight I could out there. I landed in a town call Providence Road Island, where I saw an ad for a beach house in a tiny town called Narragansett.  
  
And so I found myself living in a small but comfortable two story white house on Kingston. I got a job at a local shop selling jewelry made out of shells that the shop's owner found at the beach a few steps away. From the window in the back office you could see the summer beach goers swarming the water and sand for a space to get a tan and show off.  
  
I awoke early each morning and went for a walk on the beach. I liked it this early. Four or five o'clock. No one was ever there, and I could sort through my thoughts with the ease only solitude can bring. At seven I would walk back to the house and shower, then go to work. I think that the reason we so many customers was due in part to my accent. Many of the teenage girls would come in and giggle after every sentence I spoke. They'd lean on the glass counter tops peering at necklaces that we both knew they'd never buy, asking to see this item or weather that bracelet would be a good gift for a friend. And with no trace of my former Slytherin malice I would answer them with whatever they wanted to hear.  
  
I spent my evenings on the computer searching for any reference to my missing April. I learned little except that the child was living somewhere along this coast. I found my self searching the beach patrons for the sight of a child the right age and coloring. Though many came, none had the crystal clear blue eyes I was searching for. And I spent two years searching with no trace of her.  
  
It was April again, and the child's eleventh birthday loomed ahead of me. Another one that I would miss-but some how this one weighed just that more heavily upon me. She would receiver her letter of acceptance into Hogwarts soon. I hoped. If not, would she go to an American wizardry school? It might be better that way. She would be able to grow up without my name hanging over her like a stone ready to fall and crush her.  
  
I had made many friends in the sleepy little town, and my search from April ebbed off until my searches were perhaps once or twice a week. I search school web pages every Saturday and the first time I missed this by first over sleeping and then going out to have a beer with a few friends of mine, I stayed up most of that night crying but still went surfing on Sunday. Surfing being one of my newer hobbies. But now it was April again and there was still no trace of the child.  
  
I wanted so badly to send an owl to some one at Hogwarts, but the fear that I was a wanted man in that part of the world stopped me. Fear kept me from owling wizardry schools in my current country as well. For what would I do if I did find her? I was angry with my self for getting over her, but could do nothing about it.  
  
That morning I sat on the shore watching the waves as they rolled the rocks from my feet to the great vast ocean before me. Every wave took something from each stone, making it smoother and smaller, taking bits of it and making it anonymous bit of sand. What few shells washed up were no where near as pretty as the smooth stones. I found my mind concentrating on everything but my daughter. It had come to the point where I was to afraid even to think about her. She, old enough now to have formed an opinion of her distant father, and I was afraid of whatever that opinion might be.  
  
What if she hated me? What if, because I was so far removed from her life, she hated that fact that I had deserted her? That was how I would have felt.  
  
Another wave rolls in, and the icy water reaches for my toes but stops just short. Did you know that there are thousands more waves coming towards the shore than we really see? They start out small. Way out in the ocean; but as they creep nearer to the shore, the larger ones start gaining speed and soon take over the smaller ones. The bigger ones start building up more and more of these tiny waves until it all becomes too much and they all lose any semblance of power and crash into the rocks or the shore. Kind of like people.  
  
We are so small, each of us. But soon we get swept up by who we associate ourselves with and lose what little identity we might have once had. We each fight our peers and so-called friends for power over our little groups and then it all becomes to much. We bust apart send the shards of our companionship into the wind.  
  
Blaise received the Dementor's Kiss. Crabbe was killed by Voldemort for disobeying orders. Goyle had gone good and married some little Muggle and was working for rightness and truth. And me? I step back mentally for a moment and look at myself.  
  
I live in a run down house with warped wooden paneling and spend my days flirting with teenagers and my nights getting drunk with a bunch of men that, had they been sorted by the Hogwarts sorting hat, would have each been in Gryffindor or Hufflepuff. I had not had a relationship with any woman in eight years and I had little money and no direction for my life to take.  
  
For all I knew my daughter hated me and I was too afraid to take any true steps to finding her. The truth was that I was not getting over it, but I was getting too close to finding her and that scared me more than anything. It left me afraid that I would find her and not know what to do with the information.  
  
Would I go to her? Could I face her? She was the past I thought I had left behind. Would she accept me? She was like Harry Potter. The whole of the wizarding world knew the Malfoy name and she was starting a new school and the pressures of the name I'd given her would be too much to take.  
  
But was it also wrong of me to stay away? I didn't know if she was being beaten or mistreated by her new family. Hell, I had no proof that she was even still alive. But all these tiny fears had amassed into one great wave of fear and worry and threatened to crash down around my ears if I allowed my mind to linger on the possibilities.  
  
I was so afraid that If that wave did break over me that I would go and find her and be terribly hurt or disappointed by the child I'd find. And I didn't want to be my father. I didn't want to be disappointed by my child. I wanted her to be perfect and my fear that I would become my own father and that was the single fear that kept all the other fears in check.  
  
And then I cried. Draco Malfoy, Hogwarts bully and former inmate of Azkaban fortress, a grown man, sat there on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and cried. The tips of the waves were turning white with the threat of breaking against the shore and forcing all of those fears laid bare by the surf.  
  
I had wanted so badly to be a father. I would do everything right. I would be proud of her. I would support her decisions. I wouldn't be disappointed when she acted her rightful age. I wouldn't hit her. I wouldn't be my father.  
  
And as the tears fell faster and faster I realized something: that my fears of becoming my father were slowly turning me into my father but with out the same moral hang up. I knew that if I had raised the child then I would have been that man I'd hated all my life. And I would have hated myself for it.  
  
As I cried, the worlds spoken at Felicity's funeral swept over me. "When we die, we are not truly gone so long as we have people left behind to cry for us in our passing." I realized that I was all alone. My fears had driven me so far from the self centered buy I had once been. They had driven me away from those would have possibly wept by my graveside. I was so alone on this empty beach on some content I'd lived on for two years but hardly knew outside this town.  
  
And now, who would I leave behind? Would any of my surfing friends care if I didn't surface after going under a wave? Would they cry for me? Would any one?  
  
I am the dragon of Slytherin. I am cold and alone. Will any soul left walking this earth shed a tear for the dragon? Or must I search on for the every elusive April who haunts my dreams. I wept for her mother but will she weep for me? Is a dragon in need of the tears of others? Yes. This one is. And alone I will fly from the hands of February into the face of unpredictable April with all of my fears. I would beg her for tears but expect nothing. For who could truly cry in the wake of a dragon's passing? 


End file.
